Statistics and Sociology[3]

Published:First published in the magazineBolshevikNo. 2, 1935.

      Published according to the manuscript.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,1964,

      Moscow,Volume 23,

      pages271-277.Translated:M. S. Levin, The Late Joe Fineberg and and OthersTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive

      2002

      (2005).You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

Ofthe essays here presented for the reader’s attention,
some are published for the first time, others appeared in various
periodicals before the war. They deal with a question which now, naturally,
arouses especial interest—the significance and role of national
movements, the relationship between the national and the international. The
biggest drawback, one most frequently encountered in all the arguments on
this question, is lack of concreteness and historical perspective. It has
become customary to smuggle in every manner of contraband under cover of
general phrases. We believe, therefore, that a few statistics will prove
anything but superfluous. A comparison with the lessons of the war of what
we said before the war is not, in our view, unuseful. Unity of theory and
perspective gives the essays continuity.

January 1917

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO
			  NATIONAL MOVEMENTS

Factsare stubborn things, runs the English saying. It comes to mind,
in particular, when a certain author waxes enthusiastic about the greatness
of the “nationality principle” in its different implications and
relationships. What is more, in most cases the “principle” is applied
Just as aptly, and is just as much in place, as the exclamation “many
happyreturns of the day” by a certain folk-tale character at the sight of a
funeral.

Precisefacts, indisputable facts—they are especially abhorrent to
this type of author, but are especially necessary if we want to form a
proper understanding of this complicated, difficult and often deliberately
confused question. But how to gather the facts?  How to establish their
connection and interdependence?

Themost widely used, and most fallacious, method in the realm of
social phenomena is to tear outindividualminor facts and juggle
with examples. Selecting chance examples presents no difficulty at all, but
is of no value, or of purely negative value, for in each individual case
everything hinges on the historically concrete situation. Facts, if we take
them in theirentirety, in theirinterconnection, are not
only stub born things, but undoubtedly proof-bearing things. Minor facts,
if taken out of their entirety, out of their interconnection, if they are
arbitrarily selected and torn out of context, are merely things for
juggling, or even worse. For instance, when an author who was once a
serious author and wishes to be regarded as such now too takes the fact of
the Mongolian yoke and presents it as an example that explains certain
events in twentieth-century Europe, can this be considered merely juggling,
or would it not be more correct to consider it political chicanery? The
Mongolian yoke is a fact of history, and one doubtlessly connected with the
national question, just as in twentieth-century Europe we observe a number
of facts likewise doubtlessly connected with this question. But you will
find few people—of the type the French describe as “national
clowns”—who would venture, while claiming to be serious, to use this
fact of the Mongolian yoke as an illustration of events in
twentieth-century Europe.

Theinference is clear: we must seek to build a reliable foundation of
precise and indisputable facts that can be con fronted to any of the
“general” or “example-based” arguments now so grossly misused in
certain countries. And if it is to be a real foundation, we must take not
individual facts, but thesum totalof facts, withouta
singleexception, relating to the question under discussion. Otherwise
there will be the inevitable, and fully justified, suspicion that the facts
were selected or compiled arbitrarily, that instead of historicalphenomena being presented in objective interconnection and interdependence
and treated as a whole, we are presenting a “subjective” concoction to
justify what might prove to be a dirty business. This does happen ... and
more often than one might think.

Proceedingfrom these considerations, we have decided to begin with
statistics, fully aware of course that statistics are deeply antipathetic
to certain readers, who prefer “flattering deception” to “base truths”,
and to certain authors, who are prone to smuggle in political contraband
tinder cover of “general” disquisitions about internationalism,
cosmopolitanism, nationalism, patriotism, etc.

A FEW STATISTICS

Fora proper survey of thewholecomplex of data
on national movements, we must take thewholepopulation of the
earth. And in so doing, two criteria must be established with the utmost
accuracy and examined with the utmost fullness: first, national homogeneity
or heterogeneity of the population of various states; second, division of
states (or of state-like formations in cases where there is doubt that we
are really dealing with a state) into politically independent and
politically dependent.

Letus take the very, latest data, published in1916, and rely
on two sources: one German, theGeographical Statistical Tablescompiled by Otto Hübner, and one English,The Statesman’s
Year-Book. The first source will have to serve as a basis, for it
contains much more comprehensive data on the question that interests us;
the second we shall use to check and in some, mostly minor, cases to
correct the first.

Weshall begin our survey with the politically independent and
nationally most homogeneous states. First and foremost among these is a
group ofWest-Europeanstates, i.e., situated to the west of
Russia and Austria.

Herewe have 17 states of which five, however, though very homogeneous
in national composition, are Lilliputian in size and population. These are
Luxembourg, Monaco, SanMarino, Liechtenstein and Andorra, with a combined population of only
310,000. Doubtlessly, it would be much more correct not to include them
among the states under examination. Of the remaining 12 states, seven are
absolutely homogeneous in national composition: in Italy, Holland,
Portugal, Sweden and Norway, 99 per cent of the population are of one and
the same nationality; in Spain and Denmark the proportion is 96
per cent. Then come three states with a nearly homogeneous national
composition: France, England and Germany. In France, the Italians make up
only 1.3 per cent, in areas annexed by Napoleon III by violating and
falsifying the will of their people. England’s annexed territory, Ireland,
has a population of 4.4 million, which is less than one-tenth of the total
(46.8 million). In Germany, out of a population of 64.9 million, the
non-German element, which in practically all cases is just as nationally
oppressed as the Irish in England, is represented by the Poles (5.47
per cent), Danes (0.25 per cent) and the population of Alsace-Lorrain
(1.87 million). However, part of the latter (the exact proportion is not
known) undoubtedly incline towards Germany, due not only to language, but
also to economic interests and sympathies. All in all, about 5 million of
Germany’s population belong to alien, unequal and even oppressed nations.

Onlytwo small states in Western Europe are of mixed national
composition: Switzerland, whose population of somewhat less than four
million consists of Germans (69 per cent), French (21 per cent) and
Italians (8 per cent)—and Belgium (population less than 8 million;
probably about 53 per cent Flemings and about 47 per cent French). It
should be observed, however, that in spite of the high national
heterogeneity in these countries, there can be no question of national
oppression. In both countries all nationalities are equal under the
constitution; in Switzerland this equality is fully implemented in
practice; in Belgium there is inequality in relation to the Flemish
population, though they make up the majority, but this inequality is
insignificant compared, for instance, with what the Poles have to put up
with in Germany, or the Irish in England, not to mention what has become
customary in countries outside this group That is why, incidentally, the
term “state ofnationalities”, to which the Austrian authors Karl Renner and Otto Bauer,
opportunists on the national question, have given such wide currency, is
correct only in a very restricted sense. Namely, if, on the one hand, we
remember the special historical place of the majority of the countries of
this type (which we shall discuss later) and, on the other, if we do not
allow this term to obscure the fundamental difference between genuine
national equality and national oppression.

Takingall the countries we have discussed, we get a group of 12
West-European states with a total population of 242 million. Of these 242
million only about 9.5 million, i.e., only 4 per cent, represent oppressed
nations (in England and Germany). If we add together those sections of the
population in all these countries that do not belong to the principal
nationalities, we get about 15 million, i.e., 6 per cent.

Onthe whole, consequently, this group of states is characterised by
the following: they are the most advanced capitalist countries, the most
developed both economically and politically. Their cultural level, too, is
the highest. In national composition most of these countries are
homogeneous or nearly homogeneous. National inequality, as a specific
political phenomenon, plays a very insignificant part. What we have is the
type of “national state” people so often refer to, oblivious, in most
cases, to the historically conditional and transitory character of this
type in the general capitalist development of mankind. But that will be
dealt with in its proper place.

Itmight be asked: Is this type of state confined to Western Europe?
Obviously not. All its basic characteristics—economic (high and
particularly rapid capitalist development), political (representative
government), cultural and national—are to be observed also in the
advanced states of America and Asia: the United States and Japan. The
latter’s national composition took shape long ago and is absolutely
homogeneous: Japanese make up more than 99 per cent of the population. In
the United States, the Negroes (and also the Mulattos and Indians) account
for only 11.1 per cent. They should be classed as an oppressed nation, for
the equality won in the Civil War of 1861–65 and guaranteed by the
Constitution of the republic was in many respects increasingly curtailed in
the chief Negro areas (the South) inconnection with the transition from the progressive, pre-monopoly
capitalism of 1860–70 to the reactionary, monopoly capitalism
(imperialism) of the new era, which in America was especially sharply
etched out by the Spanish-American imperialist war of 1898 (i.e., a war
between two robbers over the division of the booty).

Thewhite population of the United States makes up 88.7 per cent of the
total, and of this figure 74.3 per cent are Americans and only 14.4
per cent foreign-born, i.e., immigrants. We know that the especially
favourable conditions in America for the development of capitalism and the
rapidity of this development have produced a situation in which vast
national differences are speedily and fundamentally, as nowhere else in the
world, smoothed out to form a single “American” nation.

Addingthe United States and Japan to the West—European countries
enumerated above, we get 14 states with an aggregate population of 394
million, of which 26 million, i.e., 7 per cent, belong to unequal
nationalities. Though this will be dealt with later, I might observe that
at the turn of the century, i.e., in the period when capitalism was being
transformed into imperialism, the majority of precisely these 14 advanced
states made especially great strides in colonial policy, with the result
that they now “dispose” of a population of over 500 million in dependent
and colonial countries.

Thegroup of East-European states—Russia, Austria, Turkey (which
geographically should now be considered among the Asian slates, and
economically a “semi-colony”), and the six small Balkan states—Rumania,
Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, Montenegro and Albania—clearly reveal a
fundamentally different picture. Not asinglenationally fully
homogeneous state! Only the small Balkan countries can he described as
national states, though we should not forget that here, too, other
nationalities comprise from 5 to 10 per cent, that very great numbers
(compared with the total number of people belonging to the given nation) of
Rumanians and Serbs live outside their “own” states, and that, in
general, the bourgeois-national development of Balkan statehoodwas not completed even by “yesterday’s” wars of 1911–12. There is not asinglenational state like Spain, Sweden, etc., among the small
Balkan countries. And in the big East European states, in all three, the
proportion of their “own”, principal nationality is only 43
per cent. More than half the population of each of these three big states,
57 per cent, is made up of other nationalities (or, to use the official
Russian term, of “aliens”). Statistically, the difference between the
West-European and East-European groups of states can be expressed as
follows:

Inthe first group we have ten homogeneous or near homogeneous national
states with an aggregate population of 231 million. There are only two
heterogeneous states, but without national oppression and with
constitutional and factual equality; their population is 11.5 million.

Inthe second group 6 states, with a population of 23 million, are
nearly homogeneous;threestates, with a population of 249
million, are heterogeneous or “mixed” and without national equality.

Onthe whole, the proportion of the foreign-nationality population
(i.e., not belonging to the principal
				nation[1]of the given state) is 6 per cent in Western Europe, and 7 per cent if we
add the United States and Japan. In Eastern Europe, on the other hand, the
proportion is
			    53 per cent![2]

[1]TheGreat Hessians in Russia, the Germans and Hungarians in Austria. the
Turks in Turkey.  —Lenin

[2]Themanuscript breaks off here.—Ed.

[3]Statisticsand Sociologywas meant for publication, legally, as a
separate pamphlet under the pen-name P. Pirynchov. The article was never
finished.